A former student, Aleysha Ortiz, is suing the city of Hartford and the local board of education. Ortiz alleges she graduated without learning how to read or write. She claims it was due to negligence and lack of proper support for her developmental disabilities.
The lawsuit claims Ortiz was denied necessary testing for dyslexia. It also claims she was removed from special education curriculum and only tested for developmental disabilities on her last day of school, revealing significant unmet educational needs.
Honestly, I wish I’d just dropped at 16 and gotten my associates. I could’ve gotten into a city where there are jobs and education opportunities by the time I was 20 and have been positioned a lot better.
I wouldn’t actually recommend anyone reading this to drop out, but hindsight is 20/20 and I think it would’ve worked for me.
If it’s just about employability, sure. You can also just get your GED without dropping out of high school. You can probably just start CC as a summer student with the GED without dropping out of HS. There’s no national database of student transcripts and colleges don’t have the resources to call every HS to see if you may have been a student. A lot of this shit runs off of assumptions and the honor system.
My issue is that this has nothing to do with employability for me.
At one point, I was so desperate to get out of the remedial track, I told the guidance counselors I would drop out and enroll the next year if the classes were “filled up”. They thought I was bluffing and stuck me back in the shit classes. They gave me the shit classes, so I dropped out and before I went back, I got a GED and tried CC. It was terrible. The exact same “Cs get degrees” mentality that made remedial classes so depressing. I went back to HS and got one year of the more advanced classes and got exactly the same grades. Turns out that when you’re not getting bullied by kids with probationary officers, you can handle the more advanced material just fine.